The invention relates to a user-adaptive audio and/or video presentation system containing a background presentation sub-system for presenting audio and/or video items, control means for controlling said presentation sub-system as regarding an automatically generated selection sequence amongst said items according to a user preference pattern, and output means for physically presenting selected items to a user. Present-day delivery systems are quickly growing in terms of storage capacity and presentation bandwidth. Vis a vis a more or less constant absorption capacity for information flow in humans, this confronts the user person with an increasingly complex decision problem for choosing between various alternative presentations. A non-limiting example of such system is a jukebox loaded with Compact Discs, that could at present contain a hundred discs with some twenty songs each. The user could then choose along various strategies, such as random amongst the discs and sequential per disc, but this has been found too restrictive. On the other hand, random selection among all tracks present is felt as insufficiently coherent.
The selection problem sketched above can occur in various other environments, such as when choosing between a hundred or more concurrent TV channels, that each feature a sequence of items, or in a large collection of CD Video discs. Similar situations can occur with video clips or video games. The items may be based on uniform technology such as in the case of CD records. In a multimedia situation, the items may be intermixed, such as audio records competing against TV channels, or in the case of simultaneously selecting among still pictures as well as among audio items for concurrent presentation of the chosen audio plus video. Competing items need not have uniform presentations, such as an audio record versus an interactive audio-plus-video-plus-graphics game. The problem may occur on several hierarchical levels at a time, such as when simultaneously selecting among audio tracks as well as among whole audio records.
The present inventors have encountered a need for machine implementing a sequential choice amongst the items that is both meaningful in view of the user's preferences, but on the other hand is sufficiently non-uniform between different presentation sessions, and thereby gives both some coherence between presentations that are relatively close in time, but also certain startling effects through differentiating between such presentations and introducing a certain variability between different sessions.